


at home

by katotastic000



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, Dangan Ronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc
Genre: M/M, Original Character(s), Past Child Abuse, Self-Harm, Self-Hatred, and OC's their kid, and it also has a happy ending, it's not as explicit as the tags may imply, uhhh they're dads
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-22
Updated: 2020-07-22
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:27:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25453132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katotastic000/pseuds/katotastic000
Summary: Tetsuo spends his first week in his new home, adopted by two seemingly kind men. He can't sleep.i'm basically just infodumping about my fanchild oc's backstory and also mondo is there to be Good Dad™
Relationships: Ishimaru Kiyotaka/Oowada Mondo
Comments: 4
Kudos: 76





	at home

**Author's Note:**

> **Me:** I want to get back into writing, so what to write? Ah yes, **_CHILDHOOD TRAUMA!!!!!_**
> 
> And yeah, this Tetsuo and the Tetsuo from [my other fanfic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22515877) are the same person.

Tetsuo reached the third-last step and the stairwell creaked. The banister's frame rung as the boy clung to it, hitting his forehead against the handrail, waiting, listening. His heart pounded in his skull and with each second of not breathing passing, it hammered with more eagerness. The house stayed silent. He breathed out and continued.

His bare feet made a smacking sound against the tiles and as sweaty as they were, stuck a little to the floor. Tetsuo padded down the hallway, the only light casted through the front door on the other end. His fingers slid on the wallpaper beside him, he jumped back when he hit a picture frame. It was too dark to tell what was inside and he moved on. His fingers met something thick and wooden, a doorframe and he turned to what he remembered was the kitchen, but he had not expected someone to be in there.

"Kid?" the silhouette spoke, darkness inside a darkness, his broad frame towering over him. "What're you doing here?" _Sugar._ Sugar helped him calm his nerves. Tetsuo didn't answer. He only stood there, frozen between hallway and kitchen and his brain running hot whether or not he should flee back upstairs. "Hm?" the figure insisted, his voice a rumble in a mountain cave.

"I can't sleep." Compared to him, Tetsuo was the last squeal of a dying mouse. He straightened up as if his spine had hardened, his puffy, bitemarked lips tight, his round, watery eyes shot forward, expecting something. "Ah, me neither," the silhouette answered. "Nightmares," he said, sighing. "They've been gone for a while but here we are again."

Tetsuo frowned. "Adults can have...nightmares?" The figure turned to him, _why did he ask that, so stupid, so rude, why, why, why_ , and chuckled. "'Course they can." Tetsuo gave an undefined hum which even he didn't know the meaning of. With the sound, a strange warmth and prickling flowed through him.

"So, why can't you sleep? Nightmares, too?" Tetsuo shook his head. _I'm not lying_ , he told himself, _I'm just not saying, that's not lying_. Besides, it hadn't been a nightmare. Nightmares woke up him scared; this dream just woke him up, leaving him empty and longing for a different bed somewhere else.

"Homesick?" Tetsuo simply shrugged. He _was_ at home, sort of. The furniture in his room was still enveloped in smell of warehouse but his bed back at the orphanage had not smelled like him either. It wasn't even his bed, so many times he had shared it.

The silhouette started out slow as he spoke, each heavy word tearing at Tetsuo's skin, "You're not comfortable with having two dads yet, right?"

Tetsuo tried to wriggle out of his skin, his shell, his rude, lying bastard-child self. His whole body shook in resistance, each muscle vibrating, his limbs moving without his command and murmurs splattered from his mouth before he could settle his fists beside him and managed to blurt out, "I'm _not_! That's mean!"

The shadow shushed him, _sharply, like a whip, a knife, anything that hurt_ , and pointed up. Tetsuo flinched back. His body contracted while the figure kept on talking, "Taka's– wait," his arms crawled up and around his torso, "_Dad_ 's asleep," his spine arched, one vertebra after the other, "still have to get used to that," his teeth chattered, _shut up, shut up, shut up_ , he told them, "See?", his head turned and sunk, "We all have to adjust."

The silhouette paused. "Kid? Tetsuo?" The words flew by, the concern and softness with them. A touch and he fell into it, a grip under his arms and his feet left the ground. Tetsuo found himself sitting on the kitchen counter after the pair of strong, calloused hands had left him. Fingers started gliding through his tousled, shaggy hair. "It's okay, Tetsuo. Nothing's gonna happen. You're safe." He did not react. "Wanna tell me what's going on?"

He was not a bad person. Tetsuo had bowed when they first met and vowed that he'd bring glory to their family, but he had knelt down to him and said, "You're enough." He took him to ice hockey practice, so that he didn't have to walk, and he stayed to watch, sometime his husband came along. They always brought something for the others when they'd picked him up from the orphanage. They were gentle with each and him, they held hands when they walked, and they held his hands when he was inbetween them.

Mom hadn't been a bad person either. Mom hummed along to the radio when she prepared dinner and she was always free to play with him. Her husband came back late from work and surprised them with a weekend trip. They took him out of his hometown for the first time in his life. She bought him clothes he had never tried on before. She took him to the zoo, to the aquarium, she taught him swimming.

Mom already had a child. Yoshitsune was three when Tetsuo, four, arrived. Yoshitsune was Mom's child by blood, unlike Tetsuo. Mom had tried two times before having Yoshitsune, she had told him. She loved all of her children but only one lived long enough to feel that. Mom wanted Yoshitsune to have company.

Tetsuo knew the commons of siblinghood; he had lived with twelve "siblings" after all. Tetsuo would tease him, Yoshitsune would pull his hair. Tetsuo played with Yoshitsune's toys, Yoshitsune took them back. Tetsuo stuck his tongue out to him, Yoshitsune threatened to tell Mom. Tetsuo laughed, what's the big deal? Yoshitsune ran away and Tetsuo chased after him.

Yoshitsune ran to Mom. By the time, he got there, he had ripped out his hair, broken his toys and cut himself with the fragments, he had put his fingers around his neck and left marks. Everytime, he ran to Mom.

Yoshitsune told Mom and Mom told Tetsuo, tears streaming down her face and she looked ugly crying. When he spoke, Mom never listened. She believed her son, not his brother. Tetsuo shouted and his body shook with a force that his voice could not convey, "It was all Yoshitsune!", so Mom locked him in the basement to see if that was true.

Yoshitsune came downstairs one night and said, "She's _my_ Mom, you know?" and slammed his cheek against the wall. Tetsuo screamed and Mom screamed when she saw that a void had replaced her son's molar. Mom slapped him, Tetsuo pleaded that it wasn't him, Mom said, "Lies!" and slapped him again until his teeth looked the same as his brother's. Mom forbid him dinner and instead, he got the attic.

They returned him, Yoshitsune's void as the receipt they never showed. Something's wrong with him. Needs repair. No need for a replacement. We'd like to get our money back. Goodbye forever. What a cheap establishment.

Tetsuo hid the story inside him, the keeper of the box, the lock and the key. Two long years, seven hundred and thirty neverending days. The caretakers that had known him all his life, the siblings he had seen love and leave; Tetsuo was blind to the chances that they'd believe him.

Tetsuo shook his head to answer his father's question. "That's okay." He removed his hand from the boy's head. It was too dark to tell but Tetsuo wanted to see his smile, tired, sad and understanding. "Do you wanna do something against that?" "You–" Tetsuo's voice was hoarse for some reason. "You can?"

Apart from wanting to hear it, the man chuckled again, white teeth flashing. "You can. I've been doing that for over, like, ten years now. For the nightmares and all that." Tetsuo rubbed imaginary tears off his cheeks and beheld his dry palm, he was surprised he didn't cry. "How does that work?" His father breathed in to start but decided against it. "I'll tell ya tomorrow. And we'll also tell Dad, okay? This shouldn't be a secret. But also tomorrow." Tetsuo slouched his shoulders. "Can you sleep? I'll go back up, too."

Tetsuo swallowed. His arms were too short to fit around his father's neck and shoulders, but he tried anyway. _Someday when I'm grown up, I'll fit around_ , he thought. "Night, Dad," he mumbled into his father's shirt, jumped off the counter and padded back upstairs, leaving his father back in the kitchen, speechless.

He didn't seem like a bad person; he actually didn't seem that way. He had nightmares. Only babies have nightmares, his brothers at the orphanage would say, but he was different, he had them and he was fighting. And he'd teach Tetsuo. Mom never taught him anything that useful. He had ways that could prevent him from crying, that could convince him that things will be okay.

And he made Tetsuo think about another future than what he was promised. He made him want to grow up here, with them. At home.


End file.
